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Help with Feedback Loop in an RPG-Themed Card Game

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AnEvenWeirderMove
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Joined: 03/07/2012

I'm working on a game design for a pseudo-deckbuilder inspired by Friedemann's game "Friday" and the video game Recettear, in which players are shopkeepers selling items to adventurers... the adventurers are represented by the decks, and as such are not owned by any player but rather are shared. The players then "hire" those adventurers to go on quests to get new items.

The problem is this: In the current design, there's a major incentive to keep any one adventurer from growing too strong, so the other players tend to sell that adventurer mediocre cards to keep his deck slowed down. The player who is planning on hiring that adventurer will choose to "train" (read: trash some cards) or sell powerful cards to them, with the hopes of speeding that deck up... Therefore, with the current way the rules are set up, the typical strategy is thus to make every adventurer as mediocre as possible. I need a mechanism that forces the players to try to specialize/build up the adventurers at least to some extent, so that there's interesting conflict over which one to hire.

I was thinking about maybe a mechanism like Troyes, in which monsters with very specific victory conditions threaten the town and MUST be defeated or all players suffer some consequence...

Or perhaps a stock-like mechanism, where players can "sponsor" certain heroes, which can still be hired by other players, but will receive some reward for their success.

Any other thoughts about a good way to deal with this?

questccg
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Joined: 04/16/2011
Give a reward or a penalty

AnEvenWeirderMove wrote:
The problem is this: In the current design, there's a major incentive to keep any one adventurer from growing too strong, so the other players tend to sell that adventurer mediocre cards to keep his deck slowed down. The player who is planning on hiring that adventurer will choose to "train" (read: trash some cards) or sell powerful cards to them, with the hopes of speeding that deck up... Therefore, with the current way the rules are set up, the typical strategy is thus to make every adventurer as mediocre as possible. I need a mechanism that forces the players to try to specialize/build up the adventurers at least to some extent, so that there's interesting conflict over which one to hire.

I have a simple solution that I resolved in my game. It is similar to your problem. Let me explain further...

I had a card called "The Merchant" which basically meant that 2 players need to swap cards (both must agree with the proposed trade). The problem was similar to yours: players did not want to trade because it seemed like semantics.

So I thought about it and came up with a *solution*: When 2 players trade or exchange (a better word) cards, BOTH players each earn ONE additional Tribute card. And so that is what encourages players to exchange score cards, its the fact that they know each player will get an extra Tribute card (which is very useful).

So my solution to you is: find a way to reward players for making stronger adventurers or punishing players who make an adventurer *weaker*.

If you know the *value* of each card, you can easily determine which cards are positive and which are negative. If each player had a *Mana pool* with different color say Black and White (could be more - but just 2 for the sake of the explanation). Cards which BOOST a player are White and you can only play a certain amount of them (until your resource pool runs out). Same goes for NEGATIVE ones, you cannot exceed your mana pool. This way you kinda *round out* each player + and -...

questccg
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In the middle

questccg wrote:
If you know the *value* of each card, you can easily determine which cards are positive and which are negative. If each player had a *Mana pool* with different color say Black and White (could be more - but just 2 for the sake of the explanation). Cards which BOOST a player are White and you can only play a certain amount of them (until your resource pool runs out). Same goes for NEGATIVE ones, you cannot exceed your mana pool. This way you kinda *round out* each player + and -...

The other solution is that each character have limits to the amount of *each type* of card. Call it a Mana pool or whatever you like, but each character has a series of limits (like 5 blue cards, 5 red cards and 5 yellow cards).

So this way you can kind of *control* which cards are given to a player and you can round out each character (not super steroids, not super crappy, somewhere in between).

The COOL part of this solution is that each adventurer could have *different* limits.

JustActCasual
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Joined: 11/20/2012
I like the sponsorship

I like the sponsorship idea... could also be concepted as 'customer loyalty'. One way to accomplish this would make players automatically gain loyalty each time they trained or sold to that adventurer.

This idea seems good because it approaches the issue from both sides: it encourages players to invest in a deck, while at the same time dissuading players from junking stuff in it (oh you want to make him terrible? he's yours now...). It's also all upside, which goes over well with players.

An easy way to do this on the reward side would be to discount the hire price: so if they would normally cost 100 gold to hire they only cost 80 gold if you have 20 loyalty with them. I like this because it plays into the competitive shop-building themes of the game rather than adding an extraneous coop aspect.

AnEvenWeirderMove
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The sponsorship idea seems

The sponsorship idea seems good, and likely to at least assuage the problem while adding another neat system to the game. However I am not confident that it would remove the tendency towards mediocrity of the decks...

Something else I was thinking of might, in combination with this, work out well.
A: Troyes-like "evil" cards which the adventurers must face, and who destroy buildings (read: remove options) if they're allowed to siege the city. They sit outside the city walls, causing spaces to be closed until they're defeated, and they require specialized heroes to defeat (basically they're only vulnerable to a certain type of damage, or something similar) and as a result, the players must work together to at least build up the hero who can fight the current most pressing threat outside the gates. (Additionally, players should get no benefit from slaying these monsters)

B: "Quest" cards representing trials that only a particular player can hire adventurers for. If these are public then it's pretty clear when a player is building towards one, so there'd be a decent chance of keeping him off of it by junking items in that adventurer's deck... if they're secret, then observant players can keep track of what's been sold to a particular adventurer, and imagine what the "Quest" might be. If they don't want to junk that adventurer, they can at least profit from the other player's effort by attempting to get related Quests, piggybacking off of the first player's effort.

I think that these, combined with some method of "protecting" an individual adventurer (perhaps each adventurer will only accept a certain number of cards, regardless) might help overcome the "gravity" dragging adventurers towards the middle.

SinJinQLB
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Joined: 12/02/2012
I don't know much about the

I don't know much about the rules of this game, but could you do something where only certain adventurers within the same "vicinity" as you are able to sell things to you? So, for instance, you can only sell to these 2 adventurers but not the other 3. That might shake things up a little bit.

Btw, do you have rules posted anywhere for this game? It sounds pretty cool.

jasongreeno
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Joined: 07/31/2008
Inspector

The earlier suggestion about reward/penalty seems like the clean solution.

What if there is a Kingdom Inspector? All untimely deaths are investigated and Merchants who sold "defective" equipment are fined for their negligence for each product sold to an adventurer.

I'd like to play this game.

AnEvenWeirderMove
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It's not playtestable yet,

It's not playtestable yet, and requires a bunch of cards, so I'm trying to get the core mechanics to a solid state before I go about designing individual equipment and monsters. As soon as I'm at a decent state regarding that I'm sure I'll have something nice to post up here :)

I like the Kingdom Inspector idea but I don't think there's a reasonable way to keep track of who sold what. I'll ponder on that.

questccg
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Can you give us some examples

AnEvenWeirderMove wrote:
I like the Kingdom Inspector idea but I don't think there's a reasonable way to keep track of who sold what. I'll ponder on that.

Perhaps if you gave us a *short list* of the types of equipment you will be using that might help. I think I have a good solution but I would need to better understand what players are going to be playing (as cards) that make the adventurer mediocre vs. being more buffed...

Maybe like 5 types of cards (which are equipment)...

AnEvenWeirderMove
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The adventurer decks will be

The adventurer decks will be made up of (so far) two types of cards: Stat Point cards in one of four "suits" (Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, and Intelligence, perhaps? Or Attack, Defense, Faith, and Magic? Anyway, right now they're just Red Blue, Yellow, and Purple) and Equipment cards, which contain an ability that consumes some number/type of stat-points to produce an effect.

At the beginning of the game, at the moment, the adventurer decks contain a random assortment of 10 Stat Point cards, which represent their starting stats. A Stat Point card can be spent to provide 1 point of the appropriate type of damage.

Equipment Cards might say something like: "Spend 2 Purple Stat Points -> +3 Purple Damage" (a pretty bad one) or "Spend Any 2 Stat Points -> Gain A Stat Point of Any Color". Weak cards contain a single ability and may only be used once per "hand" while stronger cards may contain multiple abilities, or be used multiple times before they're discarded.

Monsters have a few different damage stats: First, a number of HP. Accumulating that much damage of ANY type will kill them. Second, weaknesses. For some monsters, they can be killed by less damage, if that damage is of the right type. This could be simple: (Placeholder Zombie has 10 HP, but will die to 5 Yellow damage) or a bit tougher: (Placeholder Knight has 15 HP but will die to 8 damage, 2 damage of each type) but either way, decks specialized to defeat these types of monsters should be more easily able to do it than through brute force alone.

Essentially, a "Strong" hero would have a lot of equipment cards of the same type, and would optimize the stat cards they have so they're more likely to be able to use their equipment when it's drawn. Basically, there would be an "engine" in the deck... but players aren't likely to want to build such an engine if other players can simply hire that hero and use it, and if such an engine is built and being used by a strong player, the other players will catch on and sabotage it so that the deck is littered with other, unusable stat cards, or irrelevant equipment.

MikeyNg
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Joined: 07/12/2012
I think the loyalty concept

I think the loyalty concept works well. Personally, I am in favor of keeping at least some portion of "sabotage" available. However, doing so is at least an opportunity cost for that particular shopkeep.

What I am thinking of is this:
Provide "loyalty tokens" that each deck/hero has. (So colored in some way - each corresponding to an individual deck, but that of course changes each game.) Whenever you sell a card to a deck, you get one of those deck's loyalty tokens. Exceeding thresholds could do things like: lower the cost to hire, provide bonuses to treasure, lock out other shopkeepers (if you say, exceed more than all the others combined).

I am also thinking that you might want to look at the distribution of your equipment. On one hand, if you didn't have any weak cards, sabotage wouldn't be an issue. But I think you can tweak the distribution in such a way that there's a natural progression as the game goes on for stronger heroes. (like if there's 2:1 strong:weak cards)

You would also look at the rewards that players get for having heroes kill some of the tougher creatures, and provide positive incentive that way. Heck, you could even have "global" rewards where everyone benefits.

In this way, players are incentivized to strong heroes, although there's a possibility of sabotaging someone that's too far ahead. But, players shouldn't be incentivized to purely sabotage. In that regard, they will never be able to hire a hero and would eventually starve themself out of the marketplace. (For instance, if you as a shopkeeper need to "buy" your equipment from ____. If you only sabotage, you will eventually run out of "money" to buy things.)

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